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This story is part of a special series that explores the global water crisis. For more clean water news, photos, and information, visit National Geographics Freshwater Web site.Ernest Hemingway must be reaching for a bottle of grappa in his grave. The snows of Kilimanjaro-inspirations for a Hemingway story of the same name-could be gone by 2022, a new study confirms.The ice atop Kilimanjaro "continues to diminish right on schedule for disappearing, unfortunately, in the next couple of decades," said glaciologist Lonnie Thompson at Ohio State University in Columbus.For decades scientists have documented the disappearing glaciers on Kilimanjaro, whose peak is Africa's highest point.Whether Kilimanjaro's ice loss is due to global warming or more local factors, though, has been a point of debate. Some studies have suggested the ice loss is due primarily to what some see as local factors: less snowfall and more sublimation-a process that turns ice directly into water vapor at below freezing temperatures.The new study appears to strengthen the argument that global warmingis to blame-and that, in addition to sublimating the ice atop Africa's tallest mountain, rising global temperatures are also melting the ice."What we are seeing on Kilimanjaro is global climate change," Thompson said.(Another view: "Kilimanjaro's Glaciers May Last Longer Than Predicted"[2007].)Kilimanjaro's Disappearing Ice "Part of Climate Change"According to Thompson, the drier and less cloudy conditions leading to sublimation on Tanzania's Kilimanjaro are part of a suite of changes driven by global warming."You change the temperature profile of this planet, you are going to change precipitation and cloudiness and humidity and temperature," he said. "Those are all part of climate change."And so to say that that Kilimanjaro is not responding to global climate change is untrue."Kilimanjaro's Thinning Ice Is DeceptiveThompson and his colleagues have studied Kilimanjaro's dwindling ice for several decades.The mountain, they say, has lost 85 percent of its glacial ice since 1912. What's more, 26 percent of the ice that remained in 2000 was gone by 2007, the last time Kilimanjaro's ice was precisely mapped.Findings published today by the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.